Beyond Autumn's Stereotypes

Every year, teachers face that embarrassing time between Columbus
Day and Thanksgiving that I call "The Moon of Paper Feather Hats.''
That's when most schoolchildren study Native Americans. And because of
a lack of reliable teaching materials, what they learn usually has
little more value than those so-called "war bonnets" that 3rd graders
used to make out of construction paper. At Halloween, falling near the
middle of this period, Indians are treated like witches and monsters
and pirates in most communities, lending an air of fiction to our
lives.

Even in good schools, units focusing on Native Americans most
often have taken a hobbyist approach.

When my son was in the 5th grade, his teacher came to me and asked
for help in presenting a better Native American studies unit to her
class. For the first time in this teacher's career, her class included
a Native American child. We looked at the available materials and found
them lacking. They weren't much better than those that were around 15
years earlier, when I'd earned my own teaching degree: a lot of dead
text about dead Indians, and the same 20 pictures used again and again.
I began writing units that were more accurate than what the schools had
previously offered. But the units literally came alive as soon as I put
the non-Indian class in direct contact with a class on a reservation in
Canada, where my cousin was teaching.

Personalizing the experience had started with pen pals and photo
exchanges, but over the years, through a variety of emerging
technologies, the personalization developed to include live-chat and
video conferencing as well as face-to-face visits. All of these have
added a dimension that puts to rest stereotypes of "the vanishing
Indian."

Even in good schools, units focusing on Native Americans most often
have taken a hobbyist approach, wherein students discover tipis, corn,
moccasins, the concept of pre-Columbian existence, and the fact that we
Indians are "a thing of the past," like the dinosaurs. When it came to
important subjects like science, social studies, and geography, the
curriculum went back to being only Eurocentric. What kind of message
does that give to any child about Native American culture? Even more
disturbing, what kind of message does it give to a Native American
child about him or herself?

In my lifetime of bicultural involvement with America's great cities
and the Native American grassroots, education's stereotypical autumn
phenomenon doesn't so much make me angry as it makes me excited about
the potential of doing it better. And this is why the Cradleboard
Teaching Project was born.

Cradleboard--named for a frame made of natural materials used by
North American Indians to carry a child--takes as its goal building
cross-cultural friendships in schools without abandoning the context of
core curriculum. With funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of
Battle Creek, Mich., the project now serves children and teachers in 13
states. Since 1997, the Native American delivering sites have been
located in Mohawk, Cree, Apache, Navajo, Quinault, Lummi, Seminole,
Pueblo, Ojibwe, Coeur d'Alene, Menominee, and Native Hawaiian
communities, where award-winning excellence in education does reside,
but often has had a hard time being implemented into the system. Even
with regard to local tribal curriculum, teachers in a faraway state
can't find the best of the best in a concise and usable form.

What used to be a pair of problems is now not only solvable, but
with remedies that are also a lot of fun. The first problem has been
that mainstream (non-Indian) teachers can't find accurate, enriching
information about Native American culture. The second has been that
Native American people suffer from being misperceived all our lives
because of that lack of mainstream information. The Cradleboard project
is out to change all that by providing core curriculum "through Native
American eyes'' to all learners. Then we create cross-cultural
partnerships of widely distant classes, and the two classes study
Native American culture together.

We create core curriculum in geography, history, social studies,
music, and science that matches national content standards for
elementary, middle school, and high school levels, and we present it
through a Native American perspective. For instance, in their
examination of the principles of sound, middle school students learn
about frequency and amplitude and wavelengths and the changing lengths
of a column of air by studying flutes, as well as drums and rattles and
mouthbows and Apache violins. In our first interactive multimedia CD-
ROM, "Science: Through Native American Eyes," we use video, spoken
word, animation, text, and music to present principles of friction,
principles of sound, and the benefits and constraints of building
materials used in various styles of Native American lodges.

The trick to all this, of course, is to do it in such a way that the
culture doesn't get in the way of the science, and vice versa. Science
itself has no ethnicity. We all use and are affected by scientific
principles regardless of our ethnic backgrounds. So this CD-ROM study
of wavelengths, in which we give children virtual hands-on access to
interactive sliders like those used in recording studios, seems most
appropriate. We could be using piano or trumpet sounds; but instead, we
use Native American musical instruments, adding a cultural component
without compromising the core subject.

Similarly, the principles of friction are presented in a
straightforward way. But we illustrate friction at work through a
cultural perspective. Students learn about Snow Snake, a traditional
winter game of speed and accuracy in which a carefully constructed
lance is hurled down an icy track over a mile long. A Mohawk elder
discusses techniques of smoothing, which reduces friction, and the
lesson is reinforced with an interactive, animated game of virtual Snow
Snake in which players compare their speed scores.

Truly interactive, multimedia CD-ROMs can really enhance learning,
but they'd better be more than "point and click." We built ours so that
students engage in tests that require not only multiple-choice and
true-false answers, but also thinking, reading, writing, and
computer-keyboarding skills. Answers appear only to the teacher, and
student scores are automatically tracked and graded. A vocabulary
section includes spoken pronunciations (handy for words like Anishnabe
and Haudenasaunee), and an Image Library of 86 rare photographs seldom
seen except in museums illustrates the science curriculum. Almost
everyone who uses the material is surprised by the remarkable
accomplishments of Native American people in the sciences, especially
those associated with space exploration, medical research, and
data-logging for Formula One racing.

For most Americans, ignorance about Native American culture is the
same at age 50 as it was in grade 5. Because of that, we're getting a
lot of demand from higher- grade-level educators, as well as from
noneducators, even though we designed the CD-ROM for school use in
grade 6. University professors, in fact, were some of the first to buy
big purchases of "Science: Through Native American Eyes," and to
recommend it for use by teachers of teachers.

Native people have always had a hard time finding good educational
materials from which to learn about themselves and other indigenous
people. It's like looking in a mirror and seeing everybody reflected
but yourself. Educators in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia,
Norway, and Canada are looking to Cradleboard as a model for improving
race relations in their own countries through education. The
implications for indigenous educators internationally is exciting. By
partnering indigenous populations with mainstream ones, and basing part
of that interaction in an indigenous approach to the classic school
disciplines, we create relationships where diversity itself becomes a
positive element in teaching about the universality of science,
geography, music, and other subjects, as well as about the uniqueness
of the many cultures that use and experience these concepts.

Creating interactive multimedia is expensive, but it would defeat
our mission to serve only affluent communities. So, with a supplemental
grant from the Kellogg Foundation, we will be able to give away 1,000
CDs to deserving schools that otherwise could not afford them.
Educators wishing to qualify for these free science CD-ROMs must meet
certain criteria (financial hardship, evaluation, use of the material
in classroom settings, and so forth) and should contact the Cradleboard
Teaching Project's site on the Web at www.cradleboard.org.

The site also describes the project, offers some free supplemental
curriculum in a section called "Little Extras," and is a free on- ramp
to hundreds of Native American tribal Web sites, organizations,
magazines, celebrities, schools, and subject matters through which we
hope to build a cross-cultural bridge between groups of children who
deserve to get to know one another better--now, while they are
young.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, a teacher and songwriter, founded the Nihewan
Foundation for American Indian Education in 1969, and the Cradleboard
Teaching Project in 1996. The project has its headquarters in Kapaa,
Hawaii.

Vol. 19, Issue 9, Pages 37, 39

Published in Print: October 27, 1999, as Beyond Autumn's Stereotypes

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